Gray Dawn

26

“I don’t need your help,” my son said in rebuke. “Whoever it is after me, they don’t know where I am. And even if they did, I’m protected here.”

“I doubt if they knew where Santangelo was at, before they needed to.”

“Then why didn’t you help him?” Hannibal accused.

“I didn’t understand the deep shit you guys were in at first. I took your brother at his word. Nobody told me about Sasha and the deed he stole, about you and the Creative Mind. I thought I was lookin’ for a middle-aged woman who liked to play the numbers sometimes, a woman who needed to call her aged mother.”

Hannibal wanted to dislike me. I could see that in his eyes and sour lips. But I couldn’t blame him.

“I’ma ask you again, Mr. Rawlins, why should I trust you?”

“Because your mother told you, you could,” I said simply.

Anger Lee was a force of nature; I knew that when I was a child, and Mouse had underscored that fact with his remembered blues poem. My son knew this too. His mother was not to be ignored.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“I put her in a safe place. She has my number, and she will call. She will call me lookin’ for you.”

That was the clincher. Hannibal was connected to his mother the way a serf believes in his queen.

“I want to get Violet and bring her with us,” was his condition.

“Call her, then.”

We left through the back/front of the Penguin Club, through the dense hedge, and out from the great wood wall. My senses were at the very highest alert, like they had been in the days of World War II, when every step could have been your last, either by land mine, sniper, or bayonet in the back. I was so aware because of my son, his danger, and the intense passion I felt for Amethystine Stoller. My hypersensitive hearing picked up a car door’s lock cracking open, a gravelly step, and the clank of something metal on metal...

“Get down!” I yelled, jumping on my son, dragging him to the ground behind a light green Chevrolet.

The shots had started on our way down. Hannibal grunted. I pulled out the .32 revolver stolen from the BFNE. Maybe half a dozen more shots rang out. I lay flat behind the automobile and, aiming from the space underneath the car, shot three times.

A man grunted in pain, so I rolled to the left and shot twice more at the four legs of the two men who had come out of nowhere. When I stood up, I saw that the man I’d shot in the shins was leaning on his friend and being dragged away. I had only one bullet left and a powerful need to make the right move.

The would-be assassins tumbled into a late-model Cadillac, popped the motor, and drove off unevenly, the car moving like a drunken mare in the first days of spring with green oats fermenting in her stomach.

“Come on!” I shouted, dragging Hannibal to his feet. He was bleeding from the upper part of his left leg.

I dragged him to my car, got him in the passenger’s seat, and went around to the driver’s side looking everywhere at once. I turned the engine over and took off.

“Did the bullet go through?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so.”

“Put pressure from both hands on the wound. Press down hard, hard!”

A mile or so from the Penguin Club I pulled into an alley and turned my attention to Hannibal. Ripping the fabric of the pant leg apart, I studied the wound. If you rubbed the blood away, for a moment you could see the round hole that the bullet made.

“Ain’t bleedin’ too bad,” I said.

“Looks pretty bad to me.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “It’s not good, but I seen bullet holes where the blood’s pumpin’ out. This shot didn’t hit no major vein or artery.”

“You’re bleeding too,” Hannibal observed.

“What?”

“Your face.”

The rearview mirror revealed a leaking streak just below the right cheekbone. I took a blue rag from the glove compartment and dedicated three minutes’ pressure to stop the wound from dripping. I didn’t really care about the blood, it’s just that I didn’t want to be driving around like that. A cop seeing a bleeding Negro behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental would turn on the siren and call for backup.

“I need a doctor,” Hannibal said, almost as if talking to someone he expected to care about him.

“I got one for ya.”

We made it all the way from Watts to my mountain. I drove right up to the guard hut and called from the window, “Help.”

Cosmo rushed out from the lean-to shed.

“My son is shot,” I said.

The Sicilian guardsman didn’t ask about the son he didn’t know I had. He just pulled Hannibal out of the driver’s side and helped lug him up to the funicular.

“I’ll come with you,” he told me.

I didn’t argue with the man.

Amethystine met us at the front door, a big smile on her face until she saw what was happening.

“Bring him to the couch,” she said to Cosmo. Then, to me: “What happened to your face?”

“Same thing happened to your butt.”

She gave me only the briefest grin and began to examine the flesh wound.

“Not now,” I told her. Then: “Cosmo.”

“Yes, Mr. Easy?” he asked while laying my son out on the chaise lounge next to the terrace.

“Go to Orchestra. Tell her that we’ll need Dr. Lambert and that it will have to be kept in confidence.”

Without another word, the ocean-loving bodyguard left.

Hannibal lay on the settee, obviously in pain.

“What about Violet?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Right,” I said. “You’ll have to write down the address for me.”

“I’ll get pencil and paper,” Amethystine offered.

While she went to my office, I pulled up a chair next to Hannibal.

“How’s it feel?”

“Like your face looks,” he said.

“It’s not a bad wound. We get the bullet out and you’ll be fine.”

When he grimaced, I had the urge to take his hand, but I resisted.

“Why they wanna try an’ kill me?” he asked.

“I guess they figure that even if you have that deed, it’ll get lost without you to shepherd it.”

“That’s why they killed Santangelo?”

“Probably.”

“Kill somebody over a piece’a paper?”

“Piece’a paper that must represent a whole lotta cash.”

“Who’s doin’ all this shit?”

“You don’t know?”

“The guy you were talkin’ about, that man Sasha, he worked at a place called Clint Investment and Research Corporation. He’s an accountant. He’s the one came across that deed.”

“Deed to a plot of land in Culver City,” I said. “Signed over to a Shelly Dormer.”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Dollars to doughnuts, the man who owns your Clint company is named Waynesmith Von Crudock. He plans on makin’ a killin’ from whatever that document says, right after puttin’ you in the ground.”

Amethystine returned with the writing materials and Hannibal wrote down Violet’s name, phone number, and address.

I brought him the downstairs phone that we had on an extra-long cord.

“Tell Violet that I’ll have a guy named Fearless Jones pick her up and bring her here.”

Not long after Hannibal finished the call to his girlfriend, Dr. Irene Lambert came to the door.

“Orchestra said that somebody had been shot,” she said to me when I let her in.

“Yeah. It was an ambush, but we can’t talk to the police about it.”

The doctor was in her early sixties, slender and tall. A white woman, she’d been in practice for more than a dozen years when, in the late forties, she was arrested and charged for performing unsanctioned abortions on women and girls. Orchestra Solomon, the owner of our mountain, paid for Irene’s legal fees and gave her a home on the mountain after her conviction. Lambert had been stripped of her right to practice medicine, and then she was fined a great deal of money, everything she had. So I wasn’t worried about her turning us over to the police.

She gave Hannibal an injection that put him out. Then she went about removing the bullet while I held his legs still. She sewed him up and gave us a bottle of antibiotic pills that he was to take over the next ten days.

After the doctor left, there was only Amethystine and me standing over my sleeping boy.

“He looks a lot like you,” she said.

“He does?” I really didn’t see it.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “How’s your wound?”

“It burns a little, that’s all.”

“So it isn’t making you feel weak or anything?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Then why don’t you take me upstairs and make me a little one like this big one here?”